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Genre and Actuality in Belinskii, Herzen, and Goncharov: Toward a Genealogy of the Tragic Pattern in Russian Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Ilya Kliger
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Abstract

In this article, Ilya Kliger describes the workings of “tragic realism” during the early to mid-1840s in Russia by engaging with the critical essays and letters of Vissarion Belinskii as well as with the first novels of Ivan Goncharov and Aleksandr Herzen. Kliger seeks to show that the concepts and forms produced by the authors standing at the inception of the realist tradition in Russia can be usefully seen as transpositions of the Hegelian theorization of modernity and of its privileged formal companion, the Bildungsroman. Seen against the background of Hegel's post-tragic conception of contemporary “actuality,” these authors can be understood as developing a historico-formal paradox, a vision of tragic realism. Tragic realism grasps contemporary life in terms of destructive and irreconcilable collisions and presupposes the broader historiographic vision of Russia's anachronistic position vis-à-vis the Hegelian vision of modern life.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 70 , Issue 1 , Spring 2011 , pp. 45 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2011

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References

1 I am grateful to Kate Holland and Anne Lounsbery for their comments on an earlier version of this article. A still earlier version was presented at Berkeley's Slavic colloquium, and I am thankful to those participants for their questions and comments; in this regard, I am especially grateful to Harsha Ram. Thanks also go to Hiba Hafiz and Nasser Zakariya for reading and discussing several versions of the essay and for their generous help and thoughtful comments. Finally, I would like to thank Ilya Vinitsky and the anonymous reviewers at Slavic Review for their detailed criticism and suggestions. Hegel, G. W. F, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet, ed. Wood, Allen W (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 20.Google Scholar

2 The term tragic realism is invoked in passing in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, 1953) and taken up by John Orr, who sees it as “(depicting society and social relationships in specific settings and going] one step further by portraying the irreparable loss of the human qualities either actual or possible in the lives of its characters.” According to Orr, tragic realism “operates unlike Shakespearean or Racinian tragedy, with a guiding idea of history and society.” Unable to “create tragedy out of myth,” the tragic realist must “find it within reality itself.” See Orr, John, Tragic Realism and Modern Society: Studies in the Sociology of the Modern Novel (Pittsburgh, 1977), 12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I share with Orr the standard understanding of realism as preoccupied with depicting contemporary social life but diverge from his character-centric understanding of the tragic as essentially concerned with the irreparable loss of human qualities in the modern world. The conception of tragic realism I employ takes stock of both character and plot. Focusing on what Raymond Williams has called “the whole action,” I detect within it a pattern of substantive sociohistorical collision, representing contemporary Russian modernity as essentially torn against itself. See Williams, Raymond, Modern Tragedy (Orchard Park, N. Y, 2001).Google Scholar

3 See Tseitlin, A. G,/. A. Goncharov (Moscow, 1950), 61–71.Google Scholar

4 See Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature(Oxford, 1977), 128–35.Google Scholar

5 For an account of the semantic shifts the category of deistvitel'nost’undergoes in the course of Belinskii's life, see Ginzburg, Lidiia, O psikhologicheskoi proze (Moscow, 1999), 99.Google Scholar

6 Hegel, G. W. F, Phenomenology of Spirit,trans. Miller, Arnold V (Oxford, 1977), 263–64.Google Scholar

7 See Avineri, Shlomo, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State(London, 1972), 221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Lowith, Karl, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought,trans. Green, David. E (New York, 1991), 46.Google Scholar

8 Hegel, G. W. F, The Encyclopaedia Logic,trans. Geraets, Theodore F, Suchting, W. A, and Harris, H. S (Indianapolis, 1991), 213.Google Scholar

9 Belinskii, Vissarion, Polnoesobranie sochinenii,13 vols. (Moscow, 1953–59; hereafter PSS), 3:432–33.Google Scholar Translations from this edition are mine.

10 In German philosophical aesthetics and, by extension, in Russian criticism of the 1830s and 1840s, “drama” is often used interchangeably with “tragedy.” When either comedy or drama proper (neither comic nor tragic) is intended, we usually find qualifications or special contextual clues.

11 Belinskii's familiarity with both Friedrich Schelling's and Hegel's aesthetic theories was mediated by his friends Mikhail Bakunin, Nikolai Stankevich, and Mikhail Katkov, whose notes on Hegel's lectures on aesthetics Belinskii used extensively and even, on his own admission, copied direcdy into his essay on “The Division of Poetry into Genus and Species.” See Eugene Bowman, Herbert, Vissarion Belinski 1811–1848: A Study in the Origins of Social Criticism in Russia(Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 See White, Hayden V, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe(Baltimore, 1975), 88.Google Scholar

13 Schelling, for one, argues in Philosophical Letters onDogmatism and Criticism(1795) that the rebellion of Greek heroes against the forces of destiny “could not become a system for action [in the modern world], even for this reason alone, that such a system would presuppose a race of titans, and that, without this presupposition, it would turn out to be utterly detrimental to humanity.” See Schelling, Friedrich, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794–1796),trans. Marti, Fritz (Lewisburg, Penn., 1980), 194.Google Scholar In the case of the third and last major theorist of tragedy among German idealists, Friedrich Holderlin, matters are somewhat more complicated. See Marion Foti, Veronique, Epochal Discordance: Holderlin's Philosophy of Tragedy(Albany, 2006).Google Scholar

14 Thus, the social theorist Agnes Heller remarks: “The main contrast between all pre-modern worlds and the modern one is that the traditional worlds were really destroyed through fatal and tragic conflicts …. The conflicts of the modern world will not take a tragic shape; this world will not go down because of insoluble contradictions.” See Heller, Agnes, A Theory of Modernity(Maiden, Mass., 1999), 43.Google Scholar

15 Hegel, G. W. F, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art,trans. Knox, T. M, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1988), 1:593.Google Scholar Indeed, recent scholarship on Hegel's influence in Russia has tended to focus precisely on the “developmental,” Bildung-centered refractions of Hegelian Wirklichkeit in the thought and lives of prominent Russian intellectuals. See, for example, John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, 2007), 226–39; and Irina Paperno, “Sovetskii opyt, avtobiograficheskoe pis'mo i istoricheskoe soznanie: Ginzburg, Gertsen, Gegel',” Novoe literalurnoe obozrenie,2004, no. 68: 102–27. My account of Belinskii's Hegelian misprisions affords an alternative— obverse and complementary—perspective on the reception of die category, a perspective that reveals precisely the process whereby the “modern” paradigm of Bildung is rendered irrelevant and a more “archaic” tragic pattern of collision and catastrophe takes its place.

16 Belinskii, PSS,7:406.

17 Terras, Victor, Belinskij and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison,1974), 86.Google Scholar

18 Hegel, , Phenomenology of Spirit,447.Google Scholar

19 Belinskii, , PSS,3:441.Google Scholar

20 1 say “knowingly” because Belinskii is clearly aware of Bul'ba'sprofound nonmoclernity, characterizing its hero as a representative of an entire people “at a certain epoch of its existence” (vizvestnuiu epokhu zhizni).Belinskii, PSS,3:439. And yet, in the context of illustrating the meaning of modern deistvitel'nost', he turns to it all the same.

21 Here, an exploration of the way certain philosophical, aesthetic, and generic categories inform Belinskii's criticism gives way to a brief consideration of the way they inform his attempts to make sense of his life on a day-to-day basis. Methodologically, this is a frequently traveled path thanks in large part to Irina Paperno's work on Nikolai Chernyshevskii. See Paperno, Irina, Semiotika povedeniia: Nikolai Chernyshevskii, chelovek epokhi realizma (Moscow, 1996).Google Scholar

22 Belinskii, , PSS,11:285.Google Scholar For a similarly striking instance of tragic casting, see Belinskii's, letter to Vasilii Botkin on the subject of the death of Stankevich. Ibid., 11:538–39.Google Scholar

23 Hegel, , Aesthetics,1:193–94.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., 1:204–5.

25 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit,267–78.

26 Jean Pierre Vernant, writing about the historical conditions of tragic drama in Athens argues that tragedy arises “when a gap develops at the heart of the social experience. It is wide enough for the oppositions between legal and political thought on the one hand and the mythical and heroic traditions on the other to stand out quite clearly. Yet it is narrow enough for the conflict in values still to be a painful one and for the clash to continue to take place.” See Pierre Vernant, Jean and Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece,trans. Lloyd, Janet (New York, 1990), 27.Google Scholar

27 Belinskii, PSS,11:559. Elsewhere Belinskii writes, “The word actualitybecame for me synonymous with the word god.”Ibid., 11:387. In Belinskii's epistolary lexicon, the semantic distance between actuality as hangman and actuality as god is practically negligible.

28 Cited in Inrii Mann, Russkaiafilosofskaia estetika (1820–1830–egg.)(Moscow, 1969), 235. Translation is mine. Incidentally, Stankevich's reading of actuality here, with its idealist emphasis on “reason” (razum)and “spirit” (dukh),appears to be a bit off as well. At least, it might be misleading for those who have not quite grasped Hegel's idiosyncratic use of these terms. 29. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic,29.

30 Thus, the Hegel scholar Shlomo Avineri comments: “What is ‘actual’ is always a consequence of a deed, of action; hence a strong activist undertone runs through this couplet.” Or, put another way, “the rational has within itself the power to actualize itself, to turn from potentiainto actus.”See Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State,126.

31 Belinskii, , PSS,3:327–28.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 3:414.

33 By contrast wnith Belinskii, here is how Hegel actually defines civil society: “an association of members as self-sufficient individuals [Einzelner]in what is therefore a formal universality,occasioned by their needsand by the legal constitutionas a means of security for persons and property, and by an external orderfor their particular and common interests.“ Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right,198. The italics would have been mine had they not already appeared in Hegel. What is obviously missing in Belinskii's anachronistic interpretation are precisely the elements of self-sufficiency of the individuals and of the formal universality (i.e., rationality and freedom) that Hegel emphasizes.

34 The Soviet scholar M. Kurginian formulates the distinction between Hegel's and Belinskii's views on the proper genre of modernity as follows: “Belinskii's definition of the novel essentially differs from the definition of the novel as an ‘epic of bourgeois society' provided by Hegel. [Belinskii's] concept of ‘our time,’ that is of ‘modernity’ includes in itself the struggle against bourgeois society. Meanwhile, the Hegelian ‘epic of bourgeois society’ must view this society as absolute.” See M. Kurginian, “Poniatie tragicheskogo u Belinskogo,” in N. L. Brodskii, ed., Belinskii, istorik i teoretik literatury: Sbornik stalei(Moscow, 1949), 230; translation is mine. Kurginian's characterization of Hegel's position appears to be correct. As for Belinskii, the preceding analysis has, I believe, made it sufficiently clear that his application of the tragic mode to modern life renders the understanding of contemporary Russian society as “bourgeois” highly problematic. Belinskii seems to have thought of the forceful emergence of “burzhuazi”as a characteristic of contemporary French life and regarded this emergence with ambivalence. See Belinskii's letter to Botkin from 2 – 6 December 1847, in PSS,12:450–52.

35 On novelization in Bakhtin, see, for example, Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 7.

36 For a thorough interpretation of The Same Old Storyin light of its relationship to the Goethean model and to the tradition of the European Bildungsroman more broadly, see Krasnoshchekova, Elena, Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov: Mir tvorchestva (St. Petersburg, 1997), 17–133.Google Scholar

37 See Wolfgang von Goethe, johann, Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship,ed. and Dans. Blackall, Eric A in cooperation with Victor Lange (Princeton, 1989), 186.Google Scholar

38 Thus, when, during a late conversation, Alexander suggests that he and his uncle will never agree simply because they see life differently, the uncle objects: “Look around you! Look at what you call the crowd,not at those who live in the country, all this will take a long time to reach them,but at the modern, educated, thinking and acting crowd … And you will see that they act and think as I have uied to teach you. It was not I who invented all that I expect of you.” And in response to the question “who did?” he replies: “The age.“ See Goncharov, Ivan, The Same Old Story,trans. Ivy Litvinova (Honolulu, 2001), 319.Google Scholar Thus, Alexander's attempt to cast the collision as a conflict of two differently disposed subjectivities meets resistance from the uncle, who attributes to his own views a historical objectivity lacking in Alexander's.

39 Goncharov, , The Same Old Story,367.Google Scholar

40 See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit,279–89.

41 Belinskii, , PSS,3:407.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., 3:407–8.

43 Ibid., 3:408.

44 Ibid., 3:409.

45 Ibid., 3:410. During this period, Belinskii frequendy locates nravstvennyi zakon within just this subjectivist, or intimate, and at the same time specifically tragic, register. Ibid., 4:237–38, 264, 513; 5:53–55.

46 Ibid., 3:410–11. Genre

47 Ibid., 3:410.

48 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right,182.

49 Ghostliness, or prizrachnost'',is the term Belinskii frequently uses in his discussion of comedy. In his essay on Woe from Wit,for example, prizrachnost’ opposes deistvitel'nost' which is, as we have seen, the proper subject matter of tragedy. Unfortunately a discussion of Belinskii's theory of comedy lies beyond the purview of this essay.

50 Herzen, Aleksandr, Wlw Is to Blame? A Novel in Two Parts,trans. Katz, Michael R (Ithaca, 1984), 155.Google Scholar

51 Ibid., 162.

52 Ibid., 188.

53 Monsieur Joseph's advice to Beltov is the very reverse of the suggestion given to young Aduev by his uncle: “Beware,” says the aging idealist, “of embracing too sober a view of life.” Ibid., 239.

54 Ibid, 189.

55 Ibid., 233.

56 Ibid., 262, 264.

57 For a relevant discussion of the use of the term Schonseelichkeitby members of Belinskii's circle, see Ginzburg, O psiklwlogicheskoi proze,76. Ginzburg's overall analysis of the translation of Hegelian logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of history into the language of psychology in Russia interestingly dovetails with the analysis offered here. It is possible to see this tendency as yet another productive outcome of the sense that the sociohistorical dimension of Hegelianism was ill suited to understanding contemporary Russian life.

58 Belinskii, , PSS,10:318–44.Google Scholar

59 For an inaugural discussion of nonsynchronicity, see Ernst Bloch's original elaboration of the principl